Following the success of the first ‘Better Bedroom’, a full-scale ‘mock-up’ of an inpatient mental healthcare bedroom that opened in Warrington in October 2012 to enable those planning, designing, building, and managing such accommodation to see some of the latest technologies, fixtures, and fittings designed to enhance such environments in a realistic setting (HEJ – October 2012 and June 2013).
A second Better Bedroom is to be established in Worthing, West Sussex. Since opening at specialist window and door manufacturer, Britplas’s Warrington factory in autumn 2012, the first Better Bedroom has attracted numerous visitors. The ‘original’ Better Bedroom, to which several suppliers contributed components free-of-charge, was conceived after Design in Mental Health Network (DIMHN) members, led by healthcare planner, Jenny Gill, got together in 2007-2008 to discuss establishing a ‘mock-up’ facility to help drive significant improvements in the ‘quality’ of inpatient mental healthcare accommodation, and show the difference that high quality fixtures and fittings, and good design, could make to recovery.
Jenny Gill worked with other DIMHN members, the BRE, Britplas chairman, Kevin Gorman, DIMHN chair, Joe Forster, Gilling Dod Architects’ Andrew Arnold, Laing O’Rourke design manager, Gerald Smith, and Primera’s MD, Jerry Smith, and with suppliers and service users, to get the HBN 03-01-compliant bedroom built.
Explaining the decision to establish a second Better Bedroom at last month’s Design In Mental Health 2014 conference in Solihull (see HEJ – April 2014), project manager, Matthew Balaam, a partner at Oxford Architects ‘with a real passion for mental healthcare buildings’, told delegates it would be incorporated within the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust’s Swandean Unit in Worthing during a refurbishment of the 10-bed adult mental healthcare inpatient facility over the next 6-9 months.
He said: “We always said the ‘Better Bedroom’ was just that, rather than a ‘Best Bedroom’. The Network’s aim has always been to further develop the facility as new products, technologies, and ideas, come along. The location will be more convenient for those in southern England, and the bedroom will be located within a facility in which service-users are living, enabling us to obtain valuable feedback.” Matthew Balaam said the ‘Better Bedroom 2’ scheme was also ‘an opportunity to show how Britain can lead the way in mental healthcare building design and construction’, adding: “In the second Better Bedroom we will look to explore three types of innovation – configuration, components, and physically managing the bedroom; we must challenge all three to ensure we are doing our job correctly.”
The project partners are keen to hear from suppliers and others keen to get involved. Email: mbalaam@dimhn.org
